I’m soon going to be starting two new projects, and I thought you might all like to know about them.

Now, I know that I’ve started a lot of projects on here, and only a small fraction of them have happened, but the first of these is, in part, a music book project, and I’ve completed all of those that I’ve started.

But it’s more than that. This is a series of five books, and an ongoing podcast. I’ve already started writing the books, and I’m planning to get the first podcast episode out in October. It’s called A History Of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and it will look at rock and roll’s history, and its prehistory. It’ll be similar to my book California Dreaming, but on a much bigger scale — that looked at music made in one town, over a period of a decade. This will be looking at at least the whole of North America and the UK, and probably touching on other countries as well, and over a period from the 1930s to 2000 or so.

My plan for this is simple. I’ll release weekly episodes. For each of these I’ll be writing an essay, which will be posted as a blog post and will eventually make up a chapter of the books. That essay will be the basis for the podcast, but the podcast will not just be me reading the essay — I’ll be putting in excerpts of the music I’m talking about, I might pick up a guitar and demonstrate how some things are done, and I’ll probably go into rambling digressions. So the two things will share a common skeleton, but they’ll be different things, each suited to their own medium.

I’ll probably also, separately, put up Mixcloud mixes of the full versions of every track I excerpt in each episode, and maybe do special Patreon bonuses as well (anyone backing me on Patreon will also be backing this podcast as well as this blog and my books, and I’ll update the text on it to that effect).

The idea with this will be to cover a mixture of the obvious stuff and the obscure, and to do what seems likely to tell the best story. I’ll *obviously* talk about the Beatles or Bowie or the obvious ones, but I’ll also want to talk about things that are in the margins but had a big influence.

I’ll be looking for suggestions, from the start, for stuff to cover, but *only* from the mid-seventies onwards, where the genre gets so big and so fragmented that I’m bound to have missed an interesting story if someone doesn’t point it out to me. But I’ve got the first hundred or so songs pretty firmly decided — there’s the obvious ones by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but I’ll also be looking at pre-rock stuff like records by Ernest Tubb, Benny Goodman, and Illinois Jacquet.

I’m going to start releasing these when I have the first batch of ten episodes done.

I’m also starting a *second* podcast, which will be me reading my short fiction. Again, that will be starting when I have the first ten episodes done, again hopefully in October — that one is easier because I already have more than ten short stories I can use for the podcast. However, for that one I’m looking for a title for the podcast — if anyone can think of one, given the kind of stories I write, please suggest one.